Slicing and dicing a moral imperative

The Trudeau regime is slicing and dicing its position on the war against Da’esh/ISIL/ISIS, saying something akin to “Syria if necessary but not necessarily Syria” according to a report in iPoliticsabout Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s latest dissembling on troop deployments.

Meanwhile, over in the Financial Times, David Gardner, who is International Affairs Editor at the FT and something of an expert in his own right, says that “The assault on Aleppo is a moral test for the west.” He notes that, “reinforcements to Russia’s air force in Syria will soon be in place. Moscow and its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, have resumed bombing Aleppo after a meaningless pause ended at the weekend. Now President Vladimir Putin is all but telling the world he plans to flatten eastern Aleppo if that is what it takes to crush a five-year-old rebellion — and that there is nothing the US and Europe can do about it.“

Of course, there is “something” the West could do, but leaders like President Obama and Prime Minister Trudeau are, in Mr Gardner’s words, “looking at another Benghazi moment. Libya’s collapse into chaos after the west walked away has served as an alibi for a standoffish policy towards Syria that has resulted in that country sinking into even deadlier mayhem.” Despite David Gardner’s assertion that, “There is no alibi for turning a blind eye to atrocity,” it appears, to me, that, probably with the tacit support of a solid majority of Canadians, that’s what Justin Trudeau plans to do.

“We have met the enemy and he is us” US cartoonist Walt Kelly said, in another context. There are plenty of “enemies:”

Geopolitical aggressors, like Vladimir Putin;

Weaklings like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau; and, perhaps worst of all

The smug, self satisfied (we took a few refugees, after, and we’ve just agreed to take some more) but morally bankrupt voters throughout the US led West.

We used to stand for something …

… but maybe we, too, like so many of our American neighbours, and our friends in Europe, just want make the world go away.

It’s not going to go away, it may be, as Wordsworth said, “too much with us,” but it is with us, like it or not, and we are still part of it, like it or not again, ~ Canada isn’t “back,” prime minister, it never left, and Canadians have choices: to act morally, on principle … or to be Liberals.